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NSP4 Pragmatist Kant Nordic N P Studies in S Pragmatism 2019 Helsinki — Phillip McReynolds “Does Pragmatism Need a Concept of Autonomy?” In: Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski´ and Sami Pihlstrom¨ (Eds.) (2019). Pragmatist Kant—Pragmatism, Kant, and Kantianism in the Twenty-first Century (pp. 133–149). Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 4. Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network. issn-l 1799-3954 issn 1799-3954 isbn 978-952-67497-3-0 Copyright c 2019 The Authors and the Nordic Pragmatism Network. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. CC BY NC For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Nordic Pragmatism Network, NPN Helsinki 2019 www.nordprag.org Does Pragmatism Need a Concept of Autonomy? Phillip McReynolds UNC Charlotte 1. Introduction Although the Greek roots of the word autonomy militate against attribut- ing its invention to Immanuel Kant, it would not be a stretch to argue that Kant created a metaphysics and moral philosophy that gave birth to and insisted upon a type of autonomy not seen in prior philosophical systems (Schneewind 1998, 6). The essence of moral action insofar as it is moral for Kant is found in autonomy. For an action to count as within the bounds of morality, a moral agent must act purely out of respect for the moral law and only out of such respect. Similarly, Kant grounds the dignity that humans manifest as rational beings in their ability to employ autonomous reason rather than being subject to the vicissitudes of impulse as are, ap- parently, non-rational brutes. The Kantian idea of autonomy is probably as important a concept for the development of the concept of the modern human and its requisite demands for dignity as any other we are likely to find (ibid., 4). And yet such a high and pure standard creates a problem if one is committed to the principles of naturalism and continuity, as pragmatists tend to be. Moreover, the pragmatic maxim cuts against the very idea of “a thing in itself” apart from one’s experience of it, the very notion that Kant invoked in his critical philosophy in order to preserve a domain for autonomy to reside. Birthed in response to the discovery of evolution by natural selection, pragmatism can do naught but see human beings as evolved creatures that must cope in a world of pushes and pulls of 133 134 Pragmatist Kant impulse and desire and who, as such, have no access to a domain of pure reason. The very idea of a separate realm of autonomous reasons or actions violates the pragmatic principle of continuity in several ways. First, it is difficult to see how anything like autonomy could evolve under the pressures of natural selection whose very nature is defined by the con- cept of fitness, that is, the relevance of a given choice or adaptation for a specific, local end that is conditioned by the needs and interests of the organism. Second, it is difficult to see what difference the existence of a pure reason (even a pure practical reason) or a noumenal self could make in a naturalistically constrained world. Finally, the pragmatic principle of continuity recognizes the evolutionary principle of conservation of means. That is, any higher mechanism of reason must be built out of parts that were evolved for simpler functions, thus rebutting the faculty psychology at the heart of the Kantian system. A final friction between pragmatism and Kantian autonomy lies in the pragmatists’ tendency to focus upon the malleability of individual-other/organism-environment relations. For the pragmatists, there doesn’t seem to be a simple, concrete, whole, separate self, which Kant’s notion of autonomy requires. Pragmatists tend to focus on concepts like transaction at the expense of boundaries, and fluidity and vagueness at the expense of identity and specificity. Does this mean that pragmatists cannot avail themselves of the ethi- cally salient notion of autonomy and related conceptions? I think that the answer to this question is no. While the pragmatist will have little recourse to a Kantian conception of autonomy, rooted in a non-naturalistic meta- physics replete with discontinuities that conflict with pragmatist commit- ments, there is another conception of autonomy that is available to prag- matists that might be compatible with pragmatic commitments. What I have in mind is the concept of “biological autonomy” as articulated by Francesco Varela. At the end of the chapter, I will consider the advan- tages and disadvantages of a pragmatic appropriation of this concept that comes to us from systems theory and theoretical biology. One background assumption for my proposal is that pragmatism has been fruitfully stimulated by concepts arising from biology, specifically the theory of evolution by natural selection. Dewey (1983) and others (e.g., Popp 2007), of course, have had a lot to say about the influence of Darwinian evolution on the development of pragmatism in general and on Dewey’s thought in particular. Even so, it is important to note that evolutionary biology has changed significantly since Darwin’s and, in- McReynolds – Does Pragmatism Need a Concept of Autonomy? 135 deed, Dewey’s time. Evolutionary theory alone has undergone at least three major new syntheses: Weismannian germ theory, population genet- ics, and Franklin, Watson, Wilkins, and Crick’s discovery of the structure of dna. Moreover, biological theory has benefited from developments in other fields such as systems theory and second order cybernetics that did not exist during the heyday of classical pragmatism. The idea here isn’t that pragmatism must be “biologized” or limited to concepts deriving from biological inquiry but rather that it is already a biological philoso- phy that has been and might continue to be fruitfully stimulated by such concepts. In this chapter, I examine the features of Kantian autonomy that ren- der it problematic for pragmatists. I then argue that, while problematic, pragmatists probably can’t simply do without any sort of notion of auton- omy. In the third section, I introduce the concept of “biological autonomy” and explore the potential and the difficulties of using this concept to do the kind of work that philosophical autonomy does in the Kantian system. In general, my claim is that the concept of biological autonomy might be useful for situating and updating the naturalistic project of pragmatism so long as one keeps in mind the dangers of biologizing the humanities and/or reducing the unique situated-ness of human beings to the situa- tion of non-human biological organisms. 2. Tensions between Kantian autonomy and pragmatism There are three main areas in which tensions emerge between pragma- tism and a Kantian concept of autonomy: differing conceptions of cau- sation and law, differences with respect to Reason and inquiry, and the implications of the findings of evolutionary biology and research into the functioning of human motivational systems. 2.1 Differences with respect to causation and law Kant’s conception of autonomy depends on conceptions of causation and lawfulness with which Dewey and other pragmatists were at odds and criticized relentlessly. While not a determinist, Kant accepts the premises of determinism that were given by the then contemporary un- derstanding of Newtonian physics and, as such, must aver a special form of non-natural causation to avoid the unacceptable implications of deter- minism for morality, i. e., that if our actions are determined by empirical causes, we cannot be held accountable for our actions and morality is illu- 136 Pragmatist Kant sory. To solve this philosophical conundrum, Kant invokes the faculty of the Will, which interacts with his conception of autonomy in three ways. First, for Kant, the Will exercises a special form of causality that is peculiar to rational beings. As Thomas Hill explains, “it is a power to cause changes in the world on the basis of a rationale, which if spelled out would include our beliefs, aims, policies, and an implicit idea of a relevant rational principle” (Hill 1998, 18). Now, depending upon what is at issue when it is claimed that this is a special form of causation, a pragmatist need not necessarily object to this view and might even endorse it. Pragmatists, such as Dewey and James, embrace the notion that our ideas have causal power and that they play a role in human action in a way that is distinctive for the sorts of beings that we are. Pragmatists would, however, take issue with this claim if special were taken to mean non-natural, that is, distinct and disconnected from the kinds of processes that make up the rest of the universe. The second interaction between the Will and autonomy for Kant in- volves negative freedom. As Hill explains, a person can “act and cause events without the person’s choices being causally determined by prior physical and psychological forces” (Hill 1998, 18). On the face of it, a pragmatist would have no problem with this claim either. Insofar as prag- matists are not determinists, they view human choices as not being deter- mined by prior physical or psychological forces. However, as Hill points out, there is a dual aspect to this claim regarding negative freedom. For Kant, one is free in the negative sense only if one is (a) “able to act inde- pendently of empirical causes and...[b] capable of acting independently of empirical motives” (Hill 1998, 19, fn. 3). Now, while a pragmatist might quibble with the wording of (a), there’s no fundamental disagreement there because, as previously noted, pragmatists are not, as a rule, deter- minists. However, a pragmatist will take issue with (b) insofar as prag- matists are (radical) empiricists.
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